Hi, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Welcome to Strauss Group's second quarter, 2024 results. Following management's formal presentation, we will conduct a Q&A session. Please feel free to post any questions you may have in the chat box or send them to me via WhatsApp. As a reminder, this online Zoom conference is being recorded today, Thursday, August 29th, 2024. I would like to remind everyone that this online webinar may contain projections or other forward-looking statements regarding future events or the future performance of the company. These statements are only predictions and may change as time passes. Strauss does not assume any obligation to update that information.
Actual events or results may differ materially from those projected, including as a result of changing industry and market trends, reduced demand for our products, the timely development of our new products and their adoption by the market, increased competition in the industry and price reductions, as well as due to risks identified in the documents filed by the company with the Israeli Securities Authority. On the line with me today are Mr. Shai Babad, Strauss Group CEO, and Mr. Ariel Chetrit, Group CFO, and myself, Daniella Finn, Head of Investor Relations. As usual, we shall start with a recap of the quarterly results by CEO Shai Babad, and then move on to the financial highlights of the quarter, presented by CFO Ariel Chetrit. Shai, please go ahead.
Thank you very, very much, Daniella. In the next five to ten minutes, I'll go over the major results of Q2, and just a little bit ahead, talking about the strategy and what we see ahead. Next. Thank you. So, we can't start our presentation and talk about the second quarter without talking about the complicated times that Israel is encountering. We are going through a very complicated war, which is almost now a year since it started, and as other many companies in Israel, we also take our involvement in helping and assisting our citizens, our soldiers, the people who evacuated and the families who evacuated from their homes, and to assist in whatever we can, to help in these difficult times.
As such, we took place in funding our farmers in the south by establishing a fund for our farmers with Leket in Israel, giving millions of shekels to almost 200 farmers who encountered difficulties during the war. Our employees have been volunteering many, many hours in many, many different facilities. We have also been distributing our foods and our products to soldiers, to people who have evacuated from their homes, and we have actually put a step ahead on that during the war. Next. But going into the results of 2024 in the second quarter, after launching our strategy in the past six months, we see that some of the focuses that we put ourselves in the strategy are already taking place.
When we look at the core categories in Israel, specifically a snacking category, we see that there we get substantial growth, and our efforts on the core are actually yielding prosperity with growth that has been more than 5% in the second quarter. When we look at our investments, we put extra investments on CapEx, we put extra investments on marketing, specifically on our core, but not only, and that is helping us to boost productivity and to boost growth. When we look at China, we see that in China, we are continuing to grow in double-digit figures. We see that although we invested in a new factory, we see very, very good results with growth and with our EBIT and net margins, and specifically, and generally, looking at our water business, we also see that invest.
Installed base have been growing in water. In Israel, we are continuing our growth, and overall, the water company is showing good results. When we look at the transformation that our strategy was talking about, so I'm happy to report that when we look at our confectionery business, we have been getting back. We actually got back to the market shares that we had before the recall. So when we look at chocolate tablets and also at our snacking, sweet snacking, chocolate snacks, we see that we got back to the market share that we had before the recall, with substantial growth in sales.
We also put a lot of emphasis on our go-to-market strategy, which has been a very large effort of us, specifically the private market, and there are a lot of efforts that have been put into that as well. Portfolio optimization has been one of the focuses of our strategy. In portfolio optimization, we are happy to announce that the Israeli Competition Authority approved yesterday our deal with Marina to sell our factory in the south, dealing with fresh vegetables, and this deal will be concluded in the next 30-60 days after their approval. There are several other divestments that we are looking to do in Israel and also outside Israel, which will take place in the time of the strategy, and last but not least, our productivity efforts.
We already see that the productivity efforts that we have put into place and the productivity journey that we talked about in the strategy is starting to show some seeds with improving our, our margins in categories where the cost of goods haven't affected us, such as our dairies and others. But with all the changes that we've made and all the emphasis that we've put, we still have some challenges this quarter that we've been dealing with. Next. When we look at those challenges, yet there are five—four major challenges that we're still looking at when we look at this quarter and going forward. One is, of course, cost of goods materials. When we look at coffee prices and cocoa prices, they are not as usual. Cocoa prices have increased by 240%.
That has substantially affected our results in our confectionery business, and when we look at cocoa prices, cocoa prices have increased by 55%, robusta prices, and those two have hugely affected our results and deteriorated our margins, but when we look long term, we don't think the cocoa prices, neither coffee prices, are sustainable at those rates, and the market is foreseeing that those cost of goods will decline over time. Hence, we should see improvement in margins in the next years to come. When we look at Brazil specifically, so of course, green coffee have affected us a lot in Brazil. We are the market leader in Brazil, and as such, we have been pushing our prices there up since January this year. As a market leader, we are the first one to push markets, the prices up.
This has cost us deteriorating a little bit in market share, but it has been very monitored and planned reduction in market share to gain back profits, to gain back margins by increasing our prices. Unfortunately, the price increase is always a lag behind coffee, green coffee prices increase, and therefore, with this lag, we are waiting for coffee prices, green coffee prices to stabilize, so we will be able to enjoy the price increases and the productivity that we have done in Brazil. In addition, we are also increasing our non-R&G segments and categories in Brazil in order to push up profitability. Of course, war in Gaza has also been affecting us.
When we look a little bit at our salty snacks and also our salads, fresh salads in Israel, those two and also some of the coffee in Israel, those two, those three have been affected by the war. It's not a substantial effect, but it is an effect, specifically the Palestinian market, which we were bigger before the war, and now due to the war, this market has decreased, therefore affecting our growth. We hope that the war will be over as soon as possible for all our citizens and for our country and for everyone's sake, and that will, of course, positively impact our growth in those specific categories. And last but not least, Sabra. In Sabra, we still have some challenges. Sabra has shown us their strategy in the beginning of this month.
We are still analyzing and learning the strategy going forward, the turnaround strategy. We're still struggling there to get back market share. We have struggles there with an overcapacity plant that we are not fully utilizing, and we still have struggles there in order to get our product taste to be superior to our competitors. There's a lot of work that is being done in Sabra, still a lot of work to be done. We have improved substantially our food and safety and quality assurance in the plant itself, putting many, many standards into the plant. We have improved substantially our operational efficiency there, but there's still a lot of work to be done. We are still examining the strategy, and hopefully, by the next two, three months, we'll have a path forward for Sabra.
How will that be in our portfolio, and how will that affect our results? So overall, this leads us to the following results. We see an organic growth of 6%, which is good growth. Looking forward to the whole year, we think this is sustainable and will continue to grow substantially. Yet, because of cocoa prices and mainly coffee prices, our gross margins have deteriorated. I think that due to the productivity efforts that we are taking, we've managed to maintain gross profit levels as the same or similar to what we had last year, with a very, very small increase.
When we look at our operational profit, we are a little bit behind what we had last year, but this quarter, we also acknowledged a loss of ILS 27 million in 1x derivatives in our chocolate, in our cocoa purchasing. We do need to say that the most of that effect of those derivatives come from the cocoa prices, and the fact the cocoa prices have increased so much, and Ariel will elaborate a little bit more on that when he presents. But without that effect, we would have had similar results to last year, also in EBIT, and net profit, due to a good tax incentives that we've got, we've managed to maintain same levels of net profit. So that's overall results for Q2. Next.
If we look at the first half, the picture is more or less the same, with lesser growth, which we think will change by the end of the year. We believe we'll meet our strategic goals of growing by more than 5% this year. Gross profit and EBIT mainly affected by the cocoa prices and coffee prices, and net profit above last year, with tax incentives that we have received in the first quarter and the second quarter.
In general, I would like to say that although the results are still very low when it comes to margins, we are happy with this quarter's results, because taking out cocoa prices and coffee prices, which we don't think are sustainable for a very long time, and we think they will decrease in the next year or two, we believe that the foundations that we are putting in place with our productivity, with our emphasis on core categories, with the portfolio optimization, with the work on performance, and also with the work that we are doing on our culture and execution, all of those things that we are working are already starting to show their seeds, and we already see some of those seeds in the results.
We believe that the more we will continue with that, once cocoa prices and coffee prices will stabilize, we'll manage to see a significant growth in our productivity margin, in our EBIT margins and our net margins to reach our strategic goals. Last, just to remind everybody, this is the strategy that we launched about six months ago. We are talking about stronger home base in Israel. Stronger home base means double down on the core in Israel, making sure what are the core categories in Israel, what falls under those core categories in Israel? How do we invest in those core categories in Israel when it comes to marketing efforts or whether it comes to better infrastructure lines, digitization, factories, supply chain for those core categories?
There's a lot of work that has been done with that. Also, with the new categories that we wanna bring to Israel with alternative milk products, that is also milk drinks and alternative milk drinks, and also alternative milk yogurts and desserts that will come into place towards the end of next year once we open our new factory. We're already importing some of those products into Israel, but once we open, we'll open our plant towards the end of next year. We believe that that will also help us boost our growth. This is overall Israel with a huge work on productivity. In Brazil, when we look at our strategy, we are pushing very, very hard to increase our margins from R&G, but in parallel to that, we are growing all our non-R&G categories.
All our non-R&G categories fall under our strategy core definition, which means more than 5% growth, double-digit margins, and being a significant player in that market, and we are pushing very, very hard to grow those categories, when we look at our water in general and water in Israel and water in China business in Israel, we are continuing to grow, and despite the war, we managed to grow by 3% in sales this year. We managed to increase our installed base in Israel, unlike many other electrical products which haven't had a decrease this year because of the war, our water and product is still growing in Israel.
And when we look at China, we see substantial growth of double-digit, of almost, of more than 13% growth. This is already several quarters that we are showing a very, very unique growth, a double-digit growth in China, in our path to become number-one player in China. One other thing that happened in China this quarter is that we've managed to, To bring forward our dividend and our loan. We were supposed to get our loan back only in 2026, and dividends for the first time in 2027, and we've managed to bring that forward.
And China, the board of directors of our company in China have issued a decision to distribute ILS 80 million, about approximately ILS 80 million, back to Strauss Group. ILS 50 million out of them is a loan, ILS 30 million out of that is the dividend that we are getting for 2024. But the more important thing is that we'll be getting dividends every year now from our company in China, which is bringing forward from a plan that was supposed to start only in 2027, due to the very, very, very good results that we have there.
We are working also in our water segment, also to increase our product offering. We will be launching in the next six months and also in the first quarter and the second quarter of 2025, new products, which we call good, better, best. Some of them will be on affordable price range, some of medium price base, and some of the end price base in part of our strategy to enlarge our product offering and also to penetrate globally in a much better way. All that is falling under the major pillar or one of the major pillars of our strategy of making the company future-ready.
Bringing performance up, change, bringing new capabilities into the company, changing the way we operate, becoming much more resilient, in our performance and in our health, to support our growth engines of our home base, of Brazil, of our water company. And looking into the results, and this is why I say, although the numbers don't yet show it, we are quite pleased with the results of this quarter. We already see the seeds of what we've started to do, in the results when we take out cocoa and coffee prices, which we believe are temporarily and are not here to stay. Thank you. And Ariel, the floor is yours.
Thank you very much, Shai. I will walk briefly through the financial results of the second quarter and elaborate a little bit on Shai's words. Here we can see the organic growth of 6%, broken into the different reported segments. So we can see that the Israeli Strauss Israel segment grew by more than 6% this quarter. The main factor for this growth was the increase in sales of the confectionery and Fun & Indulgence sub-segments. Which is due to the fact of the very positive recovery trend that we see in our confectionery business.
We're back to the sales level that we experienced before the recall, and our market share in the confectionery is very similar to what it was before. So we're very pleased with these results. The second factor for the growth in the Strauss Israel segment is mainly due to the pricing actions that we took in the previous year and then at the beginning of this year. And the third factor is the timing of the Hebrew holiday, which is, of course. Looking at the six months, we don't see this effect anymore. The second segment is the coffee segment. We see an increase of sales organically more than 7%.
This is also due mainly to pricing. We're trying to catch up with the very steep increase of green coffee prices by increasing our selling prices. We're doing that more rapidly in Brazil. It takes us a little bit more time, but we are catching up in the Central Eastern Europe countries, and the third segment, Shai already spoke about, our increase in the water sales is mainly due to an increase in the installed base, which is a very positive effect.
Mainly, taking into consideration that the war effect in Israel affects negatively the demand for machines, but it didn't affect materially the demand for our water solutions. When we look at the gross profit, we can see that we are maintaining the same gross profit like the second quarter of 2023, and the gross profit profitability decreased a little bit. When we look at the different segments, we can see that the main reason for this decrease comes from the increase in green coffee prices and cocoa prices that affected the segment of Strauss Israel, and the increase of green coffee prices that affected the segment of Coffee International.
Of course, we cannot catch up with increasing our selling prices in order to preserve the same gross profitability in Coffee International. Therefore, we see this decrease in the gross profitability. Please continue. What we can see in the EBIT results is that our main lag between the results this quarter compared with the second quarter of last year comes from the Coffee International segment.
In Strauss Israel, although we experienced the decrease in gross profitability and the challenges of cocoa and green coffee prices, we can see here that due to our efforts in focusing on our core categories and the mix effect, which gives us a lot of benefit to the EBIT and also focusing on productivity, we can see that we're improving our EBIT margins in Strauss Israel segment. And as Shai explained, once green coffee prices and cocoa prices settle and even decrease in the future, we will see a more significant improvement in our profitability in this segment. In the coffee segment, as I said, we're trying to catch up with the increase of the green coffee prices.
It takes time, therefore, there is a lag, and we believe that in the second half, we'll continue with our catching up and improve our profit and profitability results. In the water segment, you can see that we are continuously improving both our sales and our operating profit, and therefore, the EBIT margins are improving also. In Brazil, it's important to notice that this quarter, we managed to stop the decrease in our gross profit and EBIT profit that we experienced in the first quarter of this year.
This quarter, we can see that we're starting to catch up with the price increases, selling price increases, and therefore, our gross profit is higher than what it was in the second quarter of last year, and the EBIT is higher than what it was in the second quarter of last year. Looking at the total EBIT and the net income of the group, we can see that the net income for this year, for this quarter, is pretty much similar to the net income of the second quarter of last year. We are compensating for the loss of ILS 20 million in our EBIT with the benefit of 1x tax benefits that we received this quarter, and we will not see these tax benefits going forward to the second half of this year.
But in the first half, it certainly helped us bring a better result to the bottom line. In the six months, we can see that the main growth trends continue. As I said, the holiday timing in Israel is not relevant for the six-month period, therefore, the growth is more neutralized, and you can see the more natural growth of Strauss Israel. And not much more to say on the other segments. And please continue. Let's go to the net profit.
And what we can see that in the six months, our ILS 24 million EBIT decrease compared to the second quarter of last year is compensated, as I said before, by tax benefits, both in the first quarter and the second quarter, bringing us more than ILS 54 million in the six months, and therefore, we can see that net profit has improved by ILS 23 million compared to the second quarter of last year. We will go now to the Q&A section, but just before that, I want to take this opportunity to thank you, Daniella, for being with us here in Strauss and serving so excellently our company and our investor relations for the past eight years. It was a pleasure working with you.
It was a pleasure going this journey together with you, and I'm sure that also the people who are here on with us in the Zoom meeting they feel the same. So thank you very much, and good luck on your journey.
I would like also to say a word and to join Ariel with that. Daniella, you've given us a very substantial time with high professionality, high devotion, with a lot of caring, and I think you've upgraded the IR division in, in Strauss tremendously. For the two years I've been a CEO, it's been a really, really pleasure working with you. I'm sure that you're gonna bring a lot of value to anywhere that you're going to be. We wish you the best, best of luck, and you are leaving behind you very, very, very big shoes to follow. So thank you very, very, very much for the time you've gave us.
Wow! Thank you very much, so yes, this is my last quarter at Strauss, and what I can say that it's been a fabulous journey. The past eight years have been interesting, challenging, amazingly, intellectually stimulating. I've really enjoyed my time here, and I wanna personally thank all my colleagues here at Strauss, but mainly Ariel, Shai, and Linda. It was an absolute pleasure working side by side with you. I thoroughly enjoyed our time together, and I just wanna thank you for your trust, and I would like to wish you to keep up the good work that you're doing here at Strauss.
Thank you.
It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much. And without further ado, I guess, we'll go on to the Q&A. So we've had a few questions from you. Thank you very much for sending in the questions. The first one is: the negative operating profit in Fun & Indulgence, was that solely due to the commodity prices, or was there anything else combined with that, and what kind of measure do you have in place to reduce the volatility in commodity prices?
So it was solely due to commodity prices. It was the derivatives this quarter, but the derivatives were caused by the very, very high cocoa prices. Our ability to adjust to that, to 240% increase in cocoa prices, like other many, many companies, doesn't really exist. You cannot increase prices by that much, and there's no intention to do so. We do believe that all the productivity that we are doing in the factory itself and all the work that we are doing in the mix itself, and the emphasis we are putting in the different categories, plus the fact that we don't think that the cocoa prices are sustainable, and we do think that they're gonna go down, and once they've settled or they'll start to decline.
They already started declining a bit from the very, very high levels they were. They were more than 10,000 , and now they're around 6,000 , 6,500 . So hopefully, it is still 3x what they were, but hopefully it will continue to go down, and hence, with all the productivity that we're doing and with the fact that we are back to our market shares, and we are back to the volumes that we. Very close to the volumes that we used to produce before the recall, we think that that will give an adequate reply or an adequate answer to the margins that we wanna get and to the conditions that we have today in the market.
Thank you, Shai. And the next question is, regarding the strategy: can you give any color on the strategy plan, and what progress has been made up till now? What are the next steps?
So I hope that this question was brought before I did the presentation. Otherwise, I failed in my presentation to actually explain what we are doing in the strategy.
It was. It was.
Oh, very good. Thank you for that, because I thought that my explanation capabilities are deteriorating as well. But generally speaking, as I mentioned before, there are four major pillars in our strategy. It's doubling down the core. We think that we are working a lot on our core categories. We already see that our core categories, out of our total sales, their portion is increasing to what it was before. I wanna remind everyone that when we set down the strategy, we said that 65% of our operations today is core, 35% is not, and we are on a journey to become 85% core and 15% non-core, and now we see already the start of the move and the tilt from those 65% we were in the growth of the core categories.
We do see also that we said that through productivity and better performance, we'll get our margins up. So when we look at categories which we hadn't had cost of goods impact on, things that didn't have to relate to cocoa or prices or coffee prices, such as our dairies, we do see that there is an increase in our margins. We do see that there is an improvement, so that is also sowing of the seeds or the path to the strategy that we are, we are seeing. We also see growth in our core categories in Israel, outside Israel, in Brazil, in our water company, which is in line with our strategy and what we set ourself to do. When it comes to portfolio optimization, there's a lot of work that is being done right now and is being done in the past few months.
There is already one deal that has been concluded, and the competition authority has approved in Israel of one of the divestment. There's still a lot of work in order to make sure that through our portfolio optimization, we do really optimize on core, growing strong and relevance for us categories, which we have a competitive edge in. And in parallel to that, we are looking into new engines of growth, which we are developing, whether it's through our water business, whether it's through our new categories in non-R&G in Brazil, or whether through our milk alternatives products, which we will produce next year once our new plant comes in. So when we look at our strategy, overall, I can say that we think that we believe that we are on track.
I put that under subject to, cocoa prices and coffee prices starting to stabilize and to decline. If cocoa prices will continue to rise by 200% again, and coffee prices will continue to robust, then it will be very difficult to keep up with our strategic goals. The focus right now of the market is that that's not sustainable, and this is not what will happen, and during 2025, the market is talking about and, projections are talking about those, commodities, settling down and getting back to better or more normal levels than they are today. So overall, if I have to give an overall the strategy, we have launched it six months ago.
We think that we are on track on what we set ourselves to do, and that's why one of the reasons we are quite pleased with the results of this quarter, and not by the numbers, but by the fact that although cocoa and coffee prices affected us so much, we were able to maintain mostly the same levels of operating profit and net profit as we had before, and that is mainly due to all the work that is being done following our strategy focuses.
Thank you, Shai, and the final question is: What were the one-off expenses in the other category, and is there reason to expect more in the future?
Okay. So, the other category includes mainly the Sabra-Obela business, and also our [Foreign language]
The Kitchen.
The Kitchen, the Kitchen Hub activity, and also some unallocated costs that we do not usually allocate to the different segments. Therefore, they are not 1x or one-off expenses, but they are recurring expenses that we expect to see in our quarterly and annual reports. I assume, I estimate it will be anywhere between ILS 10 million-ILS 20 million per quarter. That represents the relative, let's say, the level of expenses that we see with our Kitchen Hub activity, and the unallocated expenses that we have in Strauss Group.
Thank you, Ariel. And that concludes our Q&A session for today. Before we conclude, I would like to turn the call to Shai to give some closing remarks. Shai, please go ahead.
Generally, as I mentioned before, we started our strategic journey, and we are in the beginning of that journey, but so far, we think that we are on track with that journey. Those are very, very complicated times in Israel, which hopefully will be over as soon as possible. We really hope that all the hostages will come back safely to their homes, all our soldiers will get back safely to their families, and that Israel will encounter better and quieter days for everyone. It's an opportunity also to thank all the 18,000 employees of Strauss everywhere around the world, for the tremendous work that they've been doing, for all the efforts that they have been putting into the work that has been done.
It is showing, and hopefully, in the next quarters, once COGS and the area in Israel settles down, we'll manage to see the fruits of all the seeds that were invested during the past quarter and during the past year. So thank you very much.
Thank you, Shai. That concludes the second quarter results of Strauss Group. Thank you for participating.