Welcome to the fourth quarter 2023 earnings call of Almarai. Today, we have with us the senior management of the company, led by the CFO, Mr. Danko Maras. The meeting would comprise of a short presentation, followed by the Q&A session. With that introduction, I will hand over the mic to the Almarai team. Over to the Almarai team, sir.
Thank you, Mohammed, and welcome to Almarai Q4 earnings call. This is Mohammed Alk haldi, and I am here today with Almarai's CFO, Danko Maras, and Ikram Ul Haque, the Head of Finance. First, I would like to thank for hosting and organizing our call today. As usual, I assume all of you have downloaded the earnings presentation. For those who haven't, please go to Almarai website, Investor Relations page, and you will find the document. Before we start today, please pay attention to the disclaimer on page two. Danko, over to you for the next page.
Thank you, Mohammed, and good morning, good afternoon, or even good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I hope you had a nice holiday period, and moving straight into the earnings call, I'm sure you will have busy days in the next couple of days to come, but today it's about Almarai. I will continue to do what I normally do. We talk about market dynamics, business performance, and then a little bit more detailed financial performance, and then we do some Q&A. I'm sure you have a lot of questions, so that we look forward to that when that session starts. If we just move to the market dynamics, you can look a little bit on a summary of our innovations.
A lot of it is, of course, flavor and packaging extensions that we do on our existing portfolio, but also some new products. If you remember, we launched our seafood product, Seama, in the third quarter. It's interesting, the poultry side on the very bottom right there, you see the whole fresh chicken is in a new packaging, doing very well. And we also have marinated chicken parts now in Shawaya and Biryani, and the demand is very, very high. So we are fortunate to see innovation in that area, really tapping into the consumer demands that we are having in the poultry segment. And poultry is doing very well, as you can see on the next page, if we just move on and look at the market share developments.
Just to go straight down there, you see we are continuing to essentially sell what we can produce, and the 39% market share in poultry is a rapid, rapid increase. And again, we are very confident about the, the whole category and the segment. I'll talk a little bit more about that when we talk about our investment plans. Dairy is doing well, holding position, food growing also back into 35%. You can see we only have November available. Of course, we will update that when we can. But then, juice tapping a little bit, and I, I need to say it a little bit, that point that we were making in Q3 on having production issues in one of the lines, some effects of that is in October as well.
So, juice is coming up nicely as we are looking into the development in December and January. On bakery, we are holding it firm as well, around 54%, so no particular issues for us to be concerned about. Continuing to look at the highlights, if we can, on the Q4. So, I'm sure you've seen the highlights that have come out in the press, but 2% growth in the quarter. Underlying, if I may say so, the GCC component is growing 5%. However, we have been impacted continuously, and I know I've been repeating this a few times, but we do have an impact on our export sales of alfalfa from the U.S. to Asia. That drags down the revenue significantly, but does not affect the profitability in any main terms.
And then also, of course, Egypt and Jordan, and in particular Egypt, affecting us because of the devaluation. I think it might be notable to say that underlying in Egypt, the underlying growth is about 50%. But obviously, as we start comparing versus last year, you had the devaluation impact. That also impacts our revenue. The underlying profit from both Egypt and Jordan, I'll come also into a little bit more, doing actually quite well, so we are protecting the bottom line, but we do get a deflated impact on the turnover. Operating profit increasing with 5%. This is both to a normalization or stabilization of our commodities and pretty tight cost control in the organization to ensure that we are driving value in all aspects of the line items.
Then on net income, we have almost equivalent growth of about 4%, where the really residual difference you see there is the increase that we've had on interest costs, going up to SAR 375 million in the quarter. Working capital is increasing. We have, as you may know, Ramadan coming, and again, we are moving it 9 days forward from last year, as we do every year, and it's coming dangerously close to the year-end. So we need to start preparing with our inventory to ensure that we have an appropriate availability of supply for the Ramadan period. And we are in the middle of preparing for that. All of it is going very well, but obviously it had an impact in our working capital. The half a billion of increase in CapEx comes from the...
expansion we are now doing in poultry, which is in full swing. A lot of activities is going on up north in, in the kingdom, in building for the capacity of having about 450 million birds. So you'll see more of this and, and more to come also in 2024 that we can talk about. The free cash flow is SAR 555 million, the same as, every year. Sorry, as last quarter, I'm sorry. And, and, nothing to be said on that. I will talk more about full year.
If we just dissect and look a little bit on top line and look at it from countries, categories, and channels, you see obviously that, both KSA and UAE, which are the two largest markets in the left side of the pie chart, shows you the proportions we have on country share. So both KSA, UAE doing very well. Oman growing nicely with 9%. Also, we are now including Qatar. We are selling bakery products, and we are optimistic about our ability to expand the category for 2024 onwards. It's nothing that I can confirm, but there seems to be an openness to actually expand a little bit more. So very exciting news for us to see Kuwait growing. Kuwait... Sorry, Qatar growing.
On Kuwait, we have 4%, and then Bahrain, sort of flattish, and then with Jordan and Egypt and others being the alfalfa, dragging down the turnover a bit from, what I was mentioning before. If we look at categories, again, fresh dairy and poultry growing, nicely. Also on bakery and foods, we are growing. And I come back to the point I was mentioning about us having production issues on one of the machines in Q3 that we talked about. That affects the fruit juice and long life dairy, and there you see the impact, and you'll see that also when I show you the full year numbers. But we are coming out of that. It was something that was residual for us in October.
November, it's doing well, and we can see a really good, nice pickup in both December and onwards. On channels, the core core channels is evenly split, both traditional trade, modern trade, growing about 3%. Food service, 1%. Full year, they grow 10%. So it's a bit of an impact that we had also due to the juice and the long life affecting the channel. The export part is entirely the alfalfa that we are relating to. Okay, and then if we go in and look at the net income bridge, I will give the word to Ikram to go a little bit more in detail. But just the key issue for us to keep in mind is that you've seen throughout 2023, significant pricing that has been done. That is tapering off now.
We don't have intended pricing to be done significantly to the levels that you've seen in the last two years. So the net pricing of SAR 107 million is sort of the residual impact. The volume mix and the contribution from, from that is about SAR 15 million. We do have costs coming through of about SAR 58 million, but less than what we see on pricing. And our operational cost is also partly a one-time cost that we are having in the fourth quarter. Otherwise, good, good control of the, let's say, labor and overheads, but some one-time costs that affected us in the quarter. The funding you see there is entirely the increase you have in the interest cost that has affected us.
If I give the word to Ikram, please feel free to go a little bit more into detail into the categories and dissecting.
Thank you very much, Danko. And I'll go to slide 15 to talk in more detail. We're gonna discuss in detail about the revenue, operating profit, and net income. I think, Danko, you've discussed revenue in quite a lot of detail, so I'll focus more on operating profit percentage growth rates. So compared to revenue growth of 2%, operating profit grew by 5%. And if I can summarize it, there will be three major reasons why the growth is stronger than the revenue growth. The first growth, the first reason is the continual trend of stabilized commodity costs that helping us grow operating profit percentage. Second is a favorable mix. You heard Danko talk about country mix, so KSA, Oman, those country mix is helping us grow operating profit, and same favorable mix for the product as well.
Poultry product mix is more stronger, so that's also helping the operating profit percentage growth. The third reason is the strong cost control, which is in Almarai DNA, and it's helping us to improve operating profit percentage higher than the revenue growth rates. We look at net income. Net income growth is very similar to operating profit growth rate, 4%. As Danko talked earlier, it's purely a result of higher funding cost, driven by the rate increase. I will talk about the rate increase when I will discuss the full year numbers. But before that, let me talk about the Q4 numbers by segments.
When you look at by segment, you can see dairy and juice, bakery, poultry, and I will focus more on the middle of the page, where I will discuss the growth rates by revenue and the net profit growth rates for each of the segments. So despite the challenges that we faced in the long life dairy and juice, and the Egyptian pound devaluation, we're happy to report dairy and juice still grew strongly by 1%, positive growth rate, driven mainly by dairy. And the profit was also positive, 2% growth rate, higher than the revenue growth rate, driven by very strong cost control. The second is bakery. Bakery profit exceeded SAR 700 million for the quarter, as you can see on the top left-hand side. Volume growth was driven by bread and buns, and the revenue growth was driven by snacks and treats.
In summary, bakery grew by 2% on the top line, and because of fixed cost leverage, bakery net income grew by 21%, as you can see at the bottom of middle of the page. Poultry profit. Poultry revenue for the quarter was SAR 945 million, very close to the magical SAR 1 billion mark. I'm very happy to report that, Almarai Poultry had one of the best quarters in its history. Almarai sold 67 million birds in the quarter, a new record for Almarai. Because of this volume-led growth, top line grew by 12%, and the bottom line, because of this operational leverage, grew by 25%. With that said, I would like to request Danko to take us through the full year numbers, and I'll come back to it later. Danko, over to you.
Thanks, Ikram. So if we try to go through the full year as well, and maybe emphasize what has been the trend throughout the year and also in the quarter, our revenue growth is 5%, reaching SAR 19.6 billion, 853 million riyal. Again, if we talk about the trends of the effect we've had with the devaluation and the alfalfa export impact that has dragged it down, our underlying GCC growth in the year of 2023 was about 8%. And I think that is, across the board, a good result of 2023. And operating profit then continues to grow even more at 18% with about SAR 418 million.
The expectation we had on increase of commodity cost, that has been our theme, became somewhat muted, but please also remember that it didn't mean that we didn't have cost increases. We did have cost increases, but to a far lesser extent than we were expecting initially in the beginning of the year. And this normalization is continuing, so we look very positive to how things will develop for us. However, as you all know, there are some geopolitical issues that will affect us. I know we have received questions on what the Red Sea situation means to us, et cetera. All of that we need to incorporate in our conduct for 2024. But assuming that they are short-term issues that can be resolved, we are continuously looking for an easing of the commodity cost as we go forward.
The net income grows about 16%, up to SAR 2,049 million. So it's nice to be above the two billion territory again, and SAR 289 million. And here, it's a little bit the same as the fourth quarter, but please also remember a little technical detail that last year we included our joint venture with Pepsi in IDJ, in our full year numbers, all the way down to EBIT, but then we eliminated that between operating profit and net income in non-controlling interest. And because of that, you had a disproportionate impact between operating profit and net income. From now on, we don't have that. We own it 100%, and they are delivering a profit. So you will see more congruence following between operating profit and net income going forward.
The real differentiator we would see is the impact that will come on interest if it moves significantly. So that's basically close to SAR 20 billion, with a rounding on revenue and about SAR 2 billion on net income in, in, in bottom line of results. The EBIT margin being 14% is good. I'll talk more about that when we come to those charts, but it's nice to see that recovery come through. On working capital, as you saw, the increase is the same number as in the fourth quarter because they're both year-end, so 641 is the increase. I gave you the reasons.
Then if we look at CapEx, SAR 1.2 billion more than last year, a lot of it is, as I talked about, the expansion that is in full swing at the moment in Al-Shamli and in the Ha'il area for our poultry business. Not only our poultry business, but also the fact that we are now expanding into red meat, into seafood. We are spending more in CapEx, and rightfully so, with the strategic intent of creating more returns from those investments and diversifying our portfolio. So if we look at free cash flow, it's coming down with about SAR 663 million in the year, and much of that is related to the increased CapEx that we have in our business for future business that will give us good returns.
So all part of the plan, and with that, moving on to, again, dissecting the revenue on a full year basis. And again, you see very strong proportion of our sales in KSA at 67%. Growth being the highest with over SAR 1.1 billion, UAE, 91. And you can really see all the way down to GCC that we are very close to those 8% that I was referring to in terms of overall growth in the GCC area, and then being impacted by really two parts: the Egypt devaluation and then the alfalfa sales that you have in Asia. If we go to categories, I think the call out we will see here, if you just add the fresh dairy and poultry together, that's where you see the growth.
And we've seen from dairy, and now we start seeing poultry also growing rapidly, and it's fantastic to see two categories grow over a billion. Notwithstanding with that, we're also growing the foods business, SAR 176 million, bakery, SAR 145 million. And without those glitches I was referring to in fruit juice and long life dairy, it would have been better, but that's a consequence of the issue we talked about in Q3, and then other sales being the alfalfa sales to Asia. And again, on channels, good growth in traditional trade of 4%, and that is the stronghold, as you know, with 56% total sales coming from traditional trade, but also rapid growth in food service at SAR 298 million or over 10%.
So we are now looking at SAR 3.2 billion of sales in food service, which is great to see, and we continue to expand in that area. Modern trade growing about 6% is also good, and I'll leave the comments for other in export, so going forward. Again, looking at the shape and form of our income statement in a summarized way. Again, I visualize essentially what you saw for Q4, but here you can also see the impact in 2023, with SAR 1,760 million starting point, SAR 81 million coming through in volume, mix and others, and then less pricing than we did in 2022, but still up to about SAR 900 million. Costs related to that are SAR 689 million, so that gave us leverage.
Operational costs, I know I will get questions about diesel, but we also have diesel increase of cost in 2023, and it's about SAR 35 million already there. That is part of the operational cost that we have to deal with. Funding cost is about SAR 100 million more, approximately the same debt level, but because of the rise in the interest rates and the fixed versus variable portfolio, it's about SAR 100 million that we are paying more for that. And then, obviously, in all transparency, we have one of items that both are the food security support that we received the, in 2023. We also did write-downs in 2022 that are comparable benefits, as we got credits from Zakat, and I've all sort of bundled it together. I'm not a big fan of highlighting one-off items all the time.
We talk about our results the way we can, but, in and out, in all transparency, we thought we would be showing that for you. So up to SAR 249, and I think that's a respectable results for the year, and we're aiming to go for more, of course, as we move into the next year. So a little bit more, building it down into categories and profitability. Ikram could just go through that.
Thank you very much, Danko. We'll repeat the slides with the same flavor as we talked to Q4. So I think revenue, we talked in a lot of detail anyway. Let me focus on operating profits and then income sections. Operating profit of 18%, I think Danko has also talked on this issue, and the rationale is very similar to Q4, but I'd like to reiterate those three points. Stabilized commodity cost, positive mix, both product and country, and thirdly is the strong cost control. These three factors are the reason why operating profit is growing at 18%, much higher than revenue growth of 5%. And when I look at the net income, net income is also growing at 16%, despite higher funding costs.
If you look at Almarai interest rates today, we are effectively paying around 5.5%-5.7% effective interest rates, which is nearly 1.5 percentage points higher compared to last year. As you can well imagine, this is adding a big burden on our funding line. But this is getting offset by one of the key benefit of having an IDJ acquisition. As Danko talked earlier, that the underlying business is still doing very well, and I'm very happy to report that IDJ net income in Saudi Riyal is nearly 30% higher in 2023 compared to the year 2022. And this is also helping us report a net income growth of 16%, despite higher funding costs. With that said, I would like to focus on the full year by segment on the next slide.
Here you can see the total year results, and I will focus more on the nature of the business as well by the end of the slide. Let me start with dairy and juice. And again, as Danko talked about the challenges we face in Q3 and Q4, the growth would have been much higher. But regardless, we finished the year with 3% growth rate on dairy and juice, and our profit was growing higher at 4% year-on-year, driven by cost control and higher marketing investment as well. Looking at bakery, 6% growth for the full year, driven by mainly bread and bun category. And because of this volume growth rate, the profit grew at 15% on a year-on-year basis. Poultry is now hitting SAR 3.5 billion in full, full-year revenues.
If you look at number of birds, Almarai sold 254 million birds for the full year, and this volume-led growth, not price-led growth, resulted in 17% growth on a year-on-year basis for poultry. And because of the volume-led growth, operational leverage was very high, and the poultry profit grew by 43%, as you can see in the middle of the page. Before I leave this slide, I would like to talk about the different operational nature of each segment. If you look at the bottom left-hand side, you can look at the percentage of revenue. So for every SAR Almarai sells in dairy and juice category, Almarai pockets 10% in net income... But for the same SAR that Almarai sells in bakery, Almarai will report a 15% net income. Bakery remains the most profitable category for Almarai.
If I have to give an award, I'll give to poultry for the most improved category, where every riyal lets us report 12% net income for the year. And that's the story for the full year by segment. I would like to go through in detail through some of the other balance sheets, slides. Let me move to slide number 27. Here you will see the trend of CapEx, and you can see that Almarai is starting to invest more into CapEx. We are spending 13% of our revenues in CapEx this year, SAR 2.5 billion. Of the SAR 2.5 billion, SAR 1.1 billion riyal was invested in poultry. This is the expansion that Danko talked in the north of the country.
If you take away the poultry expansion, you will see that the CapEx will come back to a normalized level of SAR 1.3-SAR 1.4 billion, which has been the historic rate for the last two, three years. Please do expect this graph to trend higher for the next two or three years as Almarai completes its CapEx for SAR 6.6 billion by the year 2026. Working capital. Last time we met, this number was 25% in Q3, and as Almarai management, we promised that the number will come down, and we are very happy to report, to see that the number is now 22%. This number would have been even lower. Working capital, as percentage of revenue, should have been close to its normalized trend rate of around 20%, had it not been for the phasing of Ramadan.
We remain confident for the next two or three quarters, we'll bring this number back to a normalized range of around 20%. The next slide, slide 29. This is a new slide we've introduced. As we're entering the investment cycle for poultry, we thought it's better to show the investors how Almarai is generating cash on underlying business. So despite investment in working capital, you can see Almarai generated SAR 4.5 billion in OCF, and if you look at percentage of revenue, we generated about 23%. And we remain confident as we manage the working capital, as we grew our revenue base, we will be able to report an even higher percentage in the next four quarters. Let me now move to slides, where we will talk about the bridge for cash flows.
One of the best thing I like in this slide is the big green bar of SAR 5.4 billion, highlighting how much cash Almarai is generating on the underlying basis. This is getting offset by working CapEx, working capital expenditure of SAR 0.9 billion, so OCF remains at SAR 4.5 billion. SAR 4.5 billion is getting consumed by investment CapEx of SAR 3.3 billion. Where is this money going? SAR 2.5 billion is going into property, plant, and equipment, as we talked before, and about SAR 800 million is going into biological assets.
If I look at the free cash flow of SAR 1.2 billion, SAR 1.2 billion is being distributed to shareholders at SAR 1 billion, and our banks at about SAR 600 million, which is asking us to borrow more money from the bank, and how this extra borrowing is affecting our net debt. I would like to request Danko to take us through that trend. Danko, over to you on slide 31.
Yeah, thank you, Ikram. So just a few more slides, and then we'll start with the Q&A. The, despite the investments that you've seen that we've done, thanks to the improved EBITDA and the fact that we are improving our underlying performance so well, our net debt trend or net debt EBITDA ratio continues to be very low relative to our strategy of being somewhere around 2.5-2.7 times, to have the optimal, balance sheet structure for Almarai. So, we feel confident about our ability to internally generate the cash that we need for the expansion we're doing, both in poultry and elsewhere. And, we see the 2.1, times net debt EBITDA continue, unless there are any significant strategic, events happening that might impact that.
So very confident about the balance sheet structure. The same with the net debt to equity ratio, that even though a little bit higher net debt, because we have more equity, it's at 53% continuously. So positive development in that. A bit of a positive problem, if you can appreciate what I'm highlighting. So having a little bit of a leverage, which is below the stated strategy that we do. The EBITDA and EBIT margins is perhaps also very positive to see that. Many of you have asked me, "When is the trend changing? When is it going up again?" And it's been very positive to see that we grow profitably, but we also improve our margins compared to 2022 and 2021. We still have ways to go for the specific year in 2020 and backwards in time.
But the reality is that it's nice to see how we are swinging back to an EBIT margin of about 14% and an EBITDA margin of 23%. And assuming there are no major geopolitical events or any other distortions happening to us in 2024 onwards, we look positive to the development of both top line and bottom line in 2024 onwards. With a last point in depth, maybe, as you know, we've launched a Sukuk in July last year on quite favorable terms. And that will be repaid with another Sukuk in March 2024. So we have this deposit that you saw on Ikram's chart. The SAR 1.9 billion that we shaded there is actually excluded from the calculation and moved into above five years on the SAR 2.8 billion in total.
And that's because we've locked in the refinancing already in a deposit. So that is yielding returns to us, so it's at no cost for us at all. Frankly, it's a little bit of a gain, and that will be used in March to refinance the Sukuk that matures. And with that in mind, you can see our debt maturity profile. No, please go back. The debt maturity profile being fairly even over the years with 4.8 years. And whatever shocker might happen in the world, we're able to repay all of those amounts through our own internally generated cash flow. So we are in a good position when it comes to the borrowing portfolio that we have in place.
Finally, on dividend, we've announced—or the board of directors have announced for the AGM approval on the second of April, a SAR 1 billion dividend, and, you know, it's been steady for over four years. But if you look at the ratios relative to the net income, you can see that it's more and more in line with the 50% that we say that we should stay within. It's been up or down in different levels, but hopefully all of that is a non-issue, and it will be approved by the AGM in April. So that's it. In summary, we are very happy with the delivery of 2023. We look forward to 2024. We are ready to continue to grow our core markets. Also moving in line with our strategy into adjacent markets.
Exciting to see both ice cream, seafood, red meat, and how we can expand in those areas. I'm excited to see how we are diversifying portfolio because it is also diversifying the risks, as you know. Bottom line is moving in the right direction and assuming no major events materially happening on the front, we continue to see an easing of those commodity costs. With that, I would like to end the presentation and start with the questions and answers, please.
Ladies and gentlemen, for raising, please raise your hand in order to ask a question. The first question that we have is from Fahad Al-Ghamdi. Fahad-
Yeah.
You are requested to unmute yourself, please. Yes, Fahad, you can go ahead with the question.
Yes.
Please introduce yourself and go ahead with the question.
Okay, this is Fahad Alghamdi from NBK Wealth Management. The first question is, while you are shifting the formula UHT to skimmed milk powder, we would like to understand the impact on the excess milk capacity that used to be allocated to the UHT production. Is it gonna cause oversupply in the fresh market, or what are you planning to do with the excess capacity?
Okay, Fahad, you said that was your first question. Do you have more questions?
Yeah. Well, my second question is in regard to the recent regulation that allowed to plant the seasonal fodder. We would like you to shed some light on the impact of such decision on you.
Can you repeat the question, please, Fahad?
The recent regulation that allowed planting seasonal fodder in Saudi Arabia.
Okay.
We would like, we would like to have some clarity on the impact of such decision on you.
No, it's clear. So on the first part, when it comes to UHT and skimmed milk, we do not have an oversupply of milk in Almarai. We are. We have years of working through what you normally would see in a dairy company, where you work with something called milk balance, where you try to make sure that you optimize the right levels, both for fresh dairy, but also for long-life dairy with different recipe. So all of that has been incorporated into our strategic planning for farming and the supply of milk and how it's going to be provided. Our efforts in long-life dairy and UHT is not necessarily a short-term ambition that we're driving here. It's much more into a longer-term vision about making sure that we become the number one in long-life dairy.
We are persistent about our drive towards making sure that we have the best consumer offering in long-life dairy. Over time, you're able to adapt accordingly when it comes to the milk supply. So we do not have any surplus milk, if that was the expectation. We are accordingly planning, and we are able to do so with the capacity that the farming divisions are able to give to us. So no issue for us in terms of supply. And then in terms of the announcement of the regulation of alfalfa, it's not necessarily alfalfa. We are a little bit in a waiting mode, to be honest. We need to know a little bit more about what it actually means to us.
As you know, we have invested significant effort and amounts both in the U.S. and Argentina, and we are getting excellent supply from those markets today with world-class alfalfa. The decree or the announcement that came was not necessarily focused towards alfalfa; it was other crops. If Almarai were to embark upon resourcing it from Saudi Arabia, it is a very material amount that is needed, and that clarity is not there at the moment. We are expecting to hear more on it. We are following it and trying to understand what it will mean for us. But our current plan is that it's not gonna affect our current operations.
We continue to maximize, let's say, the efficiencies that we are now getting from an already well-established structure, both in the U.S. and Argentina. We also source from Europe to a certain extent, but not the high-quality alfalfa that gives us optimal yield for our cows in Saudi Arabia. It's very specific alfalfa that has very high quality.
Okay, thank you. Just to follow up on the first question, how is the transition going? 'Cause, what I noticed now, only the small packs are SMP, but the other packs are still fresh milk.
It's a balancing act of, depending on which market and which channels we are in, we are in some channels and countries having fresh milk, and some we are having recombined. It comes down to the recipe per se, for the retail market in KSA, where the important thing is that we have created a recombined solution that we believe has a superior product taste to our competitors. And I emphasize the point that we are in there for the long run, and we don't necessarily look at what happens in market share for a month or two, or what happens in the quarterly results.
Our commitment and announcement to you and everyone else out there in the market is that we will become number one in long-life dairy in the GCC region, and if that takes a year or two or five, it doesn't matter. Our efforts are very strong in making sure that it becomes a success, and that is a composition of making marketing events, having the numeric distribution that you need to have for the long life products, product offering to the consumers, that the taste is superior to everyone else. It's a lot of things that needs to work, and we are putting a lot of emphasis into it because we think that this belongs to Almarai, for sure.
So no particular comments on how it's going for the month or two, but what we are seeing is a fairly good sell-in.
Thank you. Sultan, I have unmuted you. If you can please unmute yourself.
Is on, going back to the SAR 2 billion mark.
Thank you.
I have a few questions, if you don't mind. First would be, what would be the volume growth that was achieved during the quarter? And if you can share for the full year, and what it would be specifically for Saudi as well.
At this point, we're not disclosing the split between price and volume more than what you saw on the bridge that we were providing. But it's not unfair to say, as guidance to all of you, that we are coming out of a period where we were forced to do significant pricing, and not only in 2023, but also in 2022. Both in 2022 and 2023, in our core market, we've had overall positive volume growth, despite the fact that we had to do significant pricing. Now, the pricing activities that we look for going forward are essentially fairly benign. There is no pricing activities needed. Of course, you need to discuss and understand the implications that diesel will have for us.
We see an impact of about SAR 100 million for Almarai, so it's not materially impacting us, and we have included that in our budgeting to make sure that we deliver an even higher profit despite that. But we do look at what the impacts are for commodity costs coming in. Otherwise, no pricing is really planned. All the growth that we essentially look for as we go forward will be volume. And we are confident about our ability to do so in the respective categories. So I will potentially disclose a little bit more for you in Q1 as we are going in and see how the split would be so that you get more clarity.
Because we have this disruption of having very strong growth coming from price, and despite that, also having good growth in volume, less than in 2022, but still positive. And then, 2024 onwards, it's a year of volume.
Clear. Thank you so much. And you mentioned the diesel impact. I'm just wondering what do you think of a possible impact that could be happening because of the increase in shipping rates due to the Red Sea shipping disruption that's happening? And if this lingers, would this probably prompt the company to discuss maybe further price increases?
Yeah, I mean, your point is, is valid. We look at all the external factors and how they are impacting us. And as you know from our past, we believe that commodity cost increases should be passed on to consumers. Inefficiencies, we need to work on internally, but commodity cost increases, we need to deal with. You know, the situation in the Red Sea is developing, and it is still possible to come to the ports in Saudi Arabia if you go through the Suez Canal. And what we are not seeing is an, an average increase of container prices with the shipping lines that we're having from San Diego and from Argentina, Buenos Aires. It's more coming from Asia, where you have shipments that are going through the Suez Canal from the south.
So parts of this, where necessary, we'd even do AF rates if we need to do so, to ensure that we don't have supply disruption. But it's very early to say what the impact will be of all of this. As you know, it's a fluid state, and the commercial impacts of that, we are making sure that it's clear to the relevant authorities on what it will be impacting us. More from the food security point of view, ensuring that we can get the shipments that we need. And because the Suez Canal is open, and they have become a little bit more nimble on open to having shipments from the north to the south to the Jeddah terminals, we are not as affected by it. That said, we do have an increase in containers coming from Asia.
We have suppliers from New Zealand, et cetera. So there is an impact. So far, it's completely manageable within our P&L, so, it's not an issue for us in the short term. If it gets a protracted issue, we will let you know, and we will also indicate that for you. And then, pricing could become relevant again, if that would be the case. It could become relevant. It all, you know, it's not an easy thing to do. Pricing requires a lot of thinking around, making sure that you're doing it in a proper way, but we will come back to that. Okay?
Yes, Mohammed Al-Rashid, I have unmuted you. Can you please introduce yourself and ask your question?
I have one question from my side, which is regarding the net profit margin of the dairy and juice segment. For the full year, still near its historical low of around 10 percentage points. So how much of that was impacted by the shutdown you talked about in the UHT and juice? And how do you see that evolving going into 2024? Thank you.
Yeah, please, Ikram, maybe you can share that to Mohammed.
Look, Mohammed, I think it's 10% that we're currently reporting, but if we were to normalize it, you can expect nearly 100 basis points difference, if it wasn't for that unfortunate incident in Q3 and Q4.
Okay, and what about the possible further realization of lower commodity costs impacted? Shall we expect it to go back to 12-13 percentage points level that was recorded back in 2019, 2018?
Look, it will take a few years, but remember, this also includes the improvement coming from Egypt and Jordan as well. So as we improve the non-performing areas, as we manage the commodity cost, which is also stabilizing, we are seeing alfalfa is reducing, we're seeing corn is coming down. So we expect maybe 50-80 basis points positive impact coming from commodity easing and operational excellence. That opportunity remains. But is that realized in 12 months or 24 months? I'm not sure we are able to give a clear direction as we speak right now.
Okay, very clear. Thank you.
And maybe I could just highlight to all of you that what you see is not a peaking cost and then a decline back to normal again, pre, let's say, 2019. We see a reduction of commodity costs, but we don't see it going back to levels pre-increase, pre this whole sort of inflationary pressure. So it's a little bit of a surprise to us also, but we see a rigidness in the reduction coming down to the historical levels. If that continues to expand, I think it's good for everyone, but the reality is that it takes longer than we expect to see the decreases, not to the extent that maybe they might be in people's general perception that we are back to normal levels again, because that's not the case.
We are still carrying higher costs, but the real exercise we had to do, which I think was done successfully, but hard work, it was the pricing that came through, and we are holding that pricing ongoing to ensure that we are getting the profitability back. Okay?
Yes. Next, we have, Sultan. Can you please introduce yourself?
Just one, one last question from my end. Do you expect any changes in the current subsidy scheme, or the amount collected, whether in the dairy or poultry?
There's nothing that has been envisaged to, to us. We are now on a much lower proportion of subsidy than we have been historically, which is also a little bit to the point about historical margins. There were much higher subsidy levels in the past. What we are seeing is a continuation of the subsidies that we're receiving for the import of alfalfa and for poultry. So there's nothing in particular that we can share with you. It's becoming a lesser portion, and, and in a way, we are, how shall I say? The less influence there is either in pricing or subsidies, the better, if you, if you can work on an efficient market basis.
So the fact that we are having less subsidies from compared to our history, it's essentially in a way, it's good because we are then driving and ensuring that we are an efficient company among our peers in the markets where we operate. So nothing has come to us, to our awareness that would change the current subsidy levels.
Very clear. Thank you so much.
Okay.
Next in line is Reem. Reem, can you please unmute yourself? Reem, can you please unmute yourself? Please, go ahead with your question. Thank you.
Reem from SICO. Thank you for hosting this call. I just had a couple of questions regarding the poultry category. Can you please shed some light on the grant received in 2023 compared to the SAR 335 million received in 2022? And, assuming this is all poultry and alfalfa related. Also, what is the current capacity within this segment? My second question is about the changes in the UHT product, formula changes that were mentioned last quarter. How has the consumer response been to this change? And my final question relates to Qatar, and I just wanted to ask about whether there is any possibility of selling dairy in Qatar in the near term.
Yes. So maybe, Irfan, if you can take the first and second question, I'll fill in on Qatar.
Sure, Reem. So, Reem, on the first one on poultry, the subsidy is about SAR 160 million-SAR 165 million for the year for the poultry, as we speak. In terms of capacity, today, we have around between 260 million-265 million birds, so we are virtually close to our full capacity. But you, you can expect some slight volume growth because of annualization. And your second question was about the formula issue? If you can please repeat that question.
Sorry. My second question was about the UHT product formula that you had mentioned last quarter, the change in the formula.
Yeah.
How has the consumer response been to the change?
I think Danko answered that before as well. We are seeing positive response in selected markets, but the recipe change and the communication is an ongoing process. It's not something we can achieve in a single month or even a single quarter. So it will take us at least two or three quarters to fully roll it out. But so far, what we've seen looks very encouraging.
All right, thank you.
Maybe I should highlight on the consumer testings that we've done on the new product with the new recipe. It has reached very, very good levels, and therefore, we are confident about the recipe change that we have done to achieve the right preference for the consumers. So we'll come back to that as we continue to invest and bring that into the market. On Qatar, I think I will be able to come back to you in the... When is it now? Is it in the 22nd of April, when we do our Q1. We are cautiously optimistic about expanding our categories in Qatar and come back to a country that has very strong recognition of the Almarai brand among the consumers.
So the market is there, we know, and we want to sell our products in there. Perhaps not dairy will be the first one, but we'll see, and I'll come back to you when we have clarity about what more we can do. And we are very hopeful, and we are well prepared to launch into Qatar. So the moment we get green light to move ahead, we essentially have our trucks waiting at the border. So we are logistically prepared to do a lot in in Qatar, and it's it would be welcoming for us to also include Qatar in our family of of Almarai markets in all categories.
Next is Taher. Taher, can you please introduce yourself and ask your question?
Good afternoon. This is, this is Taher from JP Morgan. Again, thank you, gents, for taking the time. There's two questions from my side. The first one is really on the gross profit margin. Maybe, you know, we overestimated, you know, potential impact in terms of benefits. Margins are still up, maybe year-over-year, but if you look at the quarterly trend, it's a bit weird. You know, we were still seeing some quarter-over-quarter pressure between Q3 and Q4. So I just wanna get maybe some more visibility on what's happening there. And I think the, the, the key part of the question is how should we think about the margin recovery into 2024, right?
I mean, you always highlight that you carry quite an expensive type of, you know, inventory, but this, I'm assuming, has been, you know, has been winding down over the last couple of quarters. So is it time for us to get maybe more bullish on the, on the gross margin outlook as we move into 2024, and given that you've kept prices where they are?
... It's a, it's a good question, Taher, but you know, the gross margin is a component of many different variables, and it comes down to country mix, product mix, commodity cost reductions, et cetera. We are also affected by seasonal business in the fourth quarter. So you see a top line that is fairly even across the four quarters, but you see somewhat lower profitability in the fourth quarter, and that's because of seasonal effects. So as you know, it's colder during the fourth quarter. People tend to eat less of those fresh products, like laban, that people consume a lot when it's very warm. So you have a mix issue in the fourth quarter. It's not unusual to previous quarters. So lesser gross profit, lesser profitability, also down to EBIT and net income level.
Despite that, we are enhancing the gross margin with, I think it is 48 basis points in the quarter, and, and then on the full year, you have 90 basis points. Slowly but steadily, you'll get overall... When I look at all the dynamics around it, we have opportunities to improve that gross margin even further. But the variables are there, and they could impact the gross margin. We look at it very carefully because essentially, that's the key metric for us in profitability at the end of the day, driving the mix right and ensuring that.
As we are expanding, it's also important perhaps to highlight, as we are expanding our poultry business, you will continue to have some costs that are not getting the full cost leverage, the fixed cost leverage of production output, because that's just the nature of when you're building up factories. You will have inefficiencies until production can start. These sort of things are also impacting our gross margin, and overall, our ambition to go should probably be looked at more on the long-term EBIT margin of 14%. We should be at 14%, 15% or even higher, having an ambition to go even higher, but temporarily, you'll see those variables come through. I'm personally pleased to see that the gross margin goes up and that we're driving it with almost 1% full year.
I think one or two things that are one-offs that we had in 2023 will not occur again in 2024. So I look optimistically about our ability to improve that margin even further, but not as positive as you provided in your estimate. I think that was a bit bold. I wish we, I wish you were right, but it's not easy to drive gross margin in FMCG to the extent that you were highlighting.
Okay, and just maybe, just a quick follow-up, maybe on the poultry space. I mean, it does, it does feel that it's a, it's a very active space. I mean, you know, Almarai is, again, going through CapEx and doubling capacity, but we're also seeing, you know, JBS announcing a facility in Saudi. You know, BRF is exploring, also setting up a JV with one of PIF's entities. So how, how should you- how should we look at the market two, three years down the line? And I think, you know, are you concerned around potential higher competition, oversupply? So maybe if you can just shed some light on the, you know, current, maybe poultry dynamics and potentially how the market will look in 2026, 2027, when many of these investments start to production.
No, you hear it a lot, but I really mean it. We welcome any healthy or new competition, and Almarai will support any initiative that will help achieve self-sustainability in KSA at any level. We are also looking at what this will be in the announcement that was made. But you have to look at the investments that we are doing for the brand positioning that we're doing in the market. Alyoum is a brand that is perceived as quality that you can trust, and therefore, we also have premium pricing on those products. We also have Albashayer, which is another brand that drives good growth, but not at the same price levels. So we have the price piano that allows us to compete with competitors on different segments.
If it's Albashayer, it could be even a new brand that we put in, but then Alyoum being our hero brand, that we drive with a brand equity that is so strong that we currently are not able to produce according to the demand. And that, to me, is the best testament for a good consumer goods market, where you have people who are not only, you know, communicating the differentiators for Alyoum, but actually underlying, we do have quality that we trust for the sale of our poultry products. It's a very intense market at the moment, with a lot of competitors, and you need scale to survive. It's low profitability levels if you're only dealing with poultry per se.
The benefit of using the fixed cost leverage with Almarai, and the fact that we have combined efforts with support functions to not only poultry, but also dairy and any other categories, makes us feel that we are able to maximize the optimization of, let's say, the cost efficiencies for poultry. So all of that combined, I think, sometimes when you have strong market share positions, you want to drive the category and the consumption of poultry in the kingdom even further. So competition is not bad in that respect. It's good to see, and, and, we welcome anyone who wants to bring up and increase the category consumption in that area. The competition is very fierce at this point, when you're, notwithstanding any entry from foreign investors.
And despite that, we are seeing very good development of our fresh poultry and the extensions that we are doing on different, you know, if it's marinated or if it's extensions on ready to buy, ready to eat, ready to produce, all those extensions are going very well. And I think it bottoms into the fact that we have very strong brand equity and people trust our products. Ask yourself, for people on the call, when you go to the store in LuLu, do you prefer to buy Alyoum over others? And what we see in consumer tests is that people are preferring our products, and that's really the testament of consumers' willingness to buy. Did I give you an answer that you can live with for now?
Yes, that's perfect. Thank you.
Thank you, Taher.
Next in line is Dua. Can you please introduce yourself and ask your question?
Dua, are you there?
Duaa Al- Fadda, can you please ask... introduce yourself and ask a question? Are you there? I guess there's some technical difficulty. She's not able to ask a question. Let's move on to the next participant.
Please go ahead. I see that we are going over the one-hour mark here, but we are happy to take another-
Mr. Varun? Yes.
Questions.
Yeah. Mr. Varun, please introduce yourself and ask the question. Thank you.
Yeah. Thank you very much. Can you hear me?
Yes, yes, you're audible.
Yeah. Yeah. This is Varun Kumar. I'm from SICO Asset Management. I had two questions. The first one is related to, there was a recent, I think, news article referring to a change in the government policy towards alfalfa farming in Saudi Arabia. Just want to know whether there, whether this will have any bearing on you in, from the point of view of, supply as well as pricing. And secondly, what is the outlook for the alfalfa subsidy right now? I think there is. When the subsidy was, you know, adjusted back in, I think, 2016 or 2017, there was it was, until a certain period, I think until 2023. So is there a clear outlook of, you know, how much subsidy you will get?
Has there been any change? That's what I want to get clarity on. Thank you.
Now, so on your first question about the recent announcement from the government about alfalfa in Saudi, I did answer that question before, quite comprehensively. So in short, we are not seeing scalability. There's no clarity on our end to do anything in Saudi Arabia at this point in time. It's too small, and it's not intended for alfalfa. Alfalfa is a rotation crop in some farmers, and we need it for our dairy herd. So it does not have yet the clarity that we need to see where it will come. So we are waiting for more information on what it would mean. And until such time, there's no plan, no indication to us of changes in the alfalfa subsidy that we are receiving.
Given the fact that we moved out our farming from Saudi Arabia to different locations outside Saudi Arabia, as long as that continues, we expect subsidies to continue as well. And maybe those two questions are combined, but we will have to wait and see what else comes, more clarity on what it actually would mean. It does not have the scalability that we would need in Almarai to make it viable.
Now, there are a few questions in the chat. I'm just going to read them out. The first one is from Abdullah Al Saad: When should we expect low inventory costs to kick in and reflect the lower commodity prices?
It's a difficult question because there is not one answer, depending on what inventory you have. But if you think about alfalfa, we have security stock for about a year to make sure that we don't run out of any particular availability of supply to our dairy herd. On the other hand, we have fresh products that only have 30 days or 60 days, and consumptions of corn and soy just have a different rotation in terms of inventory. So the sheer size of Almarai, unfortunately, creates this lagging effect, and you'll see that still coming out in 2024. But the reality is that the tip of the iceberg... I mean, we are on our way down now, so we are seeing continuous reduction from the high cost that we were carrying.
But it still takes, I would say, overall, if you look at overall Almarai, we'll still be impacted in, in 2024. It will come less and less, but, but, we do not have the churn, given our size and our vertical integration, that would immediately catch these benefits, because of the inventory we carry.
Okay. Thank you. So thank you, everyone, and thank you for the Almarai team. If there's anything, Danko, that you would like to talk about, as a closing remark, over to you.
No, thank you very much, and, we leave our year 2023 behind us. We are very excited about moving into 2024. Please remember now that we have Ramadan coming with nine more extra days, and what that all means in terms of comparators. We'll meet again, I believe, as I said, on the twenty-second of April, when our first quarter is over. Hopefully, everything is ready and done with the Ramadan. Look forward to talking to you then. Thank you very, very much, and have a great morning or day or afternoon or evening. Thank you. Goodbye.